Life Cast

The “casting from life” that almost killed Thomas Jefferson

In doing research for my bronze portrait sculpture of Thomas Jefferson as he might have appeared in 1819, at age 76, I naturally searched for contemporary portrait paintings or sculptures depicting him during this period of his life. I ran across references to a life casting by John H.I. Browere, done in 1825, when Jefferson was 82, and was therefore eager to find photographs of this casting. Eventually, I did, in a book from the New York State Historical Society, where the portrait sculpture made from this life casting is permanently housed. Brief text accompanying the photograph described the casting process itself as a painful one for Jefferson: Browere had to break off the hardened life cast from Jefferson’s face with mallet and chisel!

I had no idea, however, just how painful, until I read the vivid account of the process in Alan Pell Crawford’s excellent book Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson. Browere, having oiled Jefferson’s face, applied his “plastier,” or grout, in layers. About an hour later, the sculptor tried to remove the hardened grout, “without discomfort” to Jefferson.

But the grout was stuck to Jefferson’s face and would not come off.  “Evidently,” according to Crawford, “ Browere miscalculated, for when the hour had elapsed, the grout was harder and drier than anticipated. He had also failed to put enough oil in the concoction ‘to prevent its adherence to the skin,’ Virginia [Randolph, Jefferson’s granddaughter] said, and as a result, removing the plaster proved so ‘excessively painful’ and so slow that ‘we expected Grand-papa to faint from exhaustion.’

“To remove the plaster, Browere produced a mallet and chisel, and began ‘to break it into pieces and cut off a piece at a time,’ Jefferson told [James] Madison. ‘Those thumps of the mallet would have been sensible almost to a loggerhead.’ Horrified by the spectacle, the family fled the room, leaving only the artist, his subject, and Burwell [Colbert] the butler.

“Increasingly frustrated, Browere hammered away with increasing force and frequency until Jefferson was exhausted, ‘and there became real danger,’ he said ‘that the ears would separate from the head sooner than from the plaister.’ By now, ‘patient [though] he always is in suffering,’ Virginia said, Jefferson could be heard sobbing.

“He was also gasping for breath. Because of some defect in the arrangements made to permit the subject to breathe, Randall wrote, Jefferson ‘came near suffocation.’ Eager to attract the preoccupied artist’s attention but unable to speak, Jefferson grabbed the chair on which his hand rested, lifted it as high as he could, and slammed it to the floor. The surprised sculptor’s work-in-progress also fell with a clatter, and Burwell ‘sprang furiously forward,’ catching his master as he collapsed.

“Hearing the commotion, the family rushed back into the room to find Jefferson in the arms of Burwell, ‘the fierce glare of [whose] African eye boded danger.’ Permitted to ‘pick up his fragments of plaster and carry them off,’ Browere remained at Monticello as his long-suffering subject’s guest for at least that night, if not more.” (pages 214-215)

If it had been me in that room, and not Browere, with the aging Jefferson propped in a chair with pillows, I would have applied petroleum jelly to Jefferson’s face, and I don’t think there would have been “a lick of trouble,”  getting the plaster off. The oil which Browere applied probably just soaked into Jefferson’s skin, accelerated by the warming temperature of the drying grout. Actually, I would never have had the temerity to ask Thomas Jefferson, especially in his frail condition, to submit to a life casting. I would have sat knee-to-knee with him, touching his face lightly now and then to take a caliper measurement, and modeled him from life, in clay, talking with him as I worked. Imagine that!

In any event, Browere managed to produce, from the broken pieces of plaster, a casting of Jefferson’s face, which he used to create a rather grim-faced portrait bust in a “classical” style, complete with toga-like cloth folded over Jefferson’s thin chest. What was most disconcerting for me, however, was my sense that Browere’s portrait, though “cast from life,” and surely, therefore, an accurate and unmistakeable rendering of “the man himself,” didn’t look like the Jefferson I would recognize. I feared that if I were to use Browere’s portrait as the basis for my own portrait of Jefferson, I might end up with a cluster of viewers whispering to each other, “who’s that?” Or worse: “that doesn’t look anything like Thomas Jefferson!” Of course, an prominent nameplate, in bold-face type, could dispel such comments, but that would hardly be much satisfaction to me. Naturally, I wanted to achieve a “speaking likeness,” not some puzzling visage requiring an identification tag!

I had similar reservations about using Thomas Sully’s 1821 oil portrait (when Jefferson was 78), and even Gilbert Stuart’s 1805 oil portrait (when Jefferson was 62), though this latter portrait was used as the basis of the Jefferson image on the two-dollar bill (as though this could be much help).

In fact, I had begun modeling a portrait of Jefferson on the basis of these two paintings. But one afternoon, as the portrait was beginning to take shape, I stepped back to evaluate my progress, and was indeed struck with the discomfiting realization that absent a name, I don’t think I know who this guy is!

It was at that point that I fully realized my dilemma: I was attempting a portrait of Thomas Jefferson which was both historically accurate, and immediately recognizable. I felt that my mistake was in beginning with historical accuracy, in starting with Jefferson as he may really have appeared, when he was “an old man,” a “senior citizen.” But we don’t know him as an old man! In our “national memory,” Thomas Jefferson is, and will forever be, above all else, the youthful, idealistic, and splendidly handsome author of the Declaration of Independence. If you don’t believe me, search his name in Google Images.

I understood that I must begin not from the actual Jefferson of factual history, registered in contemporary likenesses, but from the iconic images of a mythic Jefferson enshrined in the American Mind. What iconic images? Take a look at Jefferson’s profile on his nickel. That’s the Jefferson we know, daily passing his image through our millions of fingers, like a talisman. Think of Mount Rushmore, our holy shrine of Great Presidents, Jefferson’s chiseled visage, hundreds of feet high, with its far-seeing gaze looking grandly out across a continent. This.

Fortunately, myth can have its basis in fact. I felt certain that the iconic Thomas Jefferson image which is stamped on our nickels, cast in our bronzes, and chiseled out of a sacred Native American mountain, was derived in part, at least from the 1789 marble portrait sculpture by Jean Antoine Houdon.

We know this portrait of Thomas Jefferson—or rather the derivations from it--though we probably don’t know Houdon.  He was an eighteenth century French sculptor famous in his own day for his marble portrait busts of “nobility,” including King XVI and the Emperor Napoleon. (There were many other very accomplished portraitists at this time, too.) When I first began doing portrait sculptures, I studied, at length, excellent photographs of his portraits busts, in an oversized book borrowed from the Virginia Tech Art & Architecture Library. I marveled at Houdon’s technique, the vitality and life-life effects he was able to achieve. The eyes of his marble portrait busts appeared so astonishingly real that I was almost persuaded that he must have inserted glass eyes. I decided from my study that sculpture for Houdon was all about light and shadow, rather than about mass and volume. It was therefore a huge pleasure for me, several years later, to visit the National Portrait Gallery, and view a special exhibit of Houdon’s great works, and come face-to-face with his “speaking likenesses.”

But I digress. Having decided that my starting point for a portrait of Thomas Jefferson would need to be the young Jefferson of the American Mind, rather than the old Jefferson of historical reality, I stopped sculpting the clay model which I had already begun, based upon the Gilbert and Sully oil portraits, when Jefferson was 61 and 78, respectively. I began again, this time working from a reproduction of the Houdon bust which I had purchased at Monticello. Satisfied that I now had a Jefferson we would recognize, I turned to a police text, Forensic Art and Illustration, by Karen Taylor, and gave Mr. Jefferson the evidence of his years: jowls, wrinkles, headache lines in his forehead, a sunkenness in his cheeks--all the painfully earned marks of growing physical, financial, and familial troubles. For while 1819 was the year his beloved University of Virginia was formally chartered, it was also the year of a shocking event: Jefferson’s grandson, Jeff Randolph was stabbed in a fight, and nearly died from the wound; worse, the assailant was Charles Bankhead, the husband of Jeff Randolph’s sister, Ann. These troubles, and more, are recounted in vivid and intimate detail, in Twilight at Monticello.

One more thing: Houdon, like Browere, would make a lifemask, as well as compiling extensive tables of measurements, in preparation for a portrait. So, also like Browere, he visited Jefferson at Monticello, sat him down, and covered his face with plaster. But there’s no record of him having to use mallet and chisel to get it off!